In the Middle of the Wood Read Free Page A

odd silence in the compartment. The hefty man was sitting quietly and relaxedly with his hands folded in his lap, quite at ease, quite assured and confident. The thin man was staring straight ahead of him. It was as if they were all waiting for something to happen, Ralph was quite convinced of this. He had never seen a black curtain on the window of a train before now except at night. And then again it seemed to him that there was a connection between the curtain, and the black tie that the hefty man was wearing. It snaked down his shirt. Was he wearing it in honour of Ralph’s death? Why should anyone wear a black tie with a tweedy suit and, furthermore, if he had been at a funeral and was returning to Glasgow after it, one would have expected him to have a case.
    No, what had happened was quite clear to him. Linda had employed these two thugs in order to get rid of him. She had had plenty of time to phone, at least for the thin man, and presumably she had already given him his instructions. First, she had tried to drive him mad and failing to do that she was now trying to get rid of him. How had he not seen that so clearly before? It was because murder for him belonged to another world, not to his own world, perhaps to a city like Glasgow. And yet the newspapers were full of women who hired thugs to kill their husbands. It was true that they had often quarrelled in the past — Linda in fact despised him — but it had never occurred to him before that she would want to kill him. He looked sideways at her and studied her profile. Of course she was very strong-minded, for instance she had refused to have children, and nothing he could have said would have persuaded her otherwise. Not that he himself cared all that much for children as such, but it would have been a new experience. What was a writer without children? He was missing the common world with all its troubles and its complications. Oh, he had learned a lot from watching other people’s children, but that wasn’t the same, of course not.
    It was quite clear to him that she was tired of him, she had perhaps been attracted at first by the unusual nature of his work but had then discovered that he was essentially a boring ordinary person after all. He could never understand why she had married him: but now she was intent on cancelling that error much as she would cancel an error in her typing, like the secretary which she had once been. How had he never understood before how implacably cold her mind was?
    He stared at the black curtain on the window and thought to himself, The two of them will knock me out, perhaps strangle me, and then they will leave the train, or shift compartments. No one will see them because of the black curtain. Or they might even open the door and throw me out of the train. Already he felt his body rolling down a slope as it arched out of the train, and could see Linda watching it as if it were the end of a shoddy rainbow. Though she and the scarred man were chatting about the latter’s wife and baby, he was quite sure that all that was a pose. It was a subtle con: she was only pretending to be interested in the baby, if baby there was, which he doubted. Why, if she were so interested in babies, did she not have one of her own?
    He listened to the noise made by the train. It wasn’t the usual rhythm. In fact it seemed to hum to itself the tune ‘When You and I Were Young, Maggie’, which was one of his favourite songs. He didn’t understand why this should be since he wasn’t a sentimental person and usually despised such songs and tunes.
    â€˜In days of long long ago… .’
    the train beat out in repetitive rhythm.
    The words brought back to him the times he and Linda, in the innocence of their courtship, had had dinner in many different hotels at weekends, and then late at night had watched Cannon on television, when they would together drink wine, or he whisky and she gin. The tune bothered